Corridors of Power (17 page)

Suddenly she asked me: ‘You see Roger quite a lot nowadays, don’t you?’ I nodded.

‘I suppose you realize that
no one
has any influence on him?’

She gave her loud, unconstricted laugh.

‘I don’t mean he’s a monster. He lets me do anything I want round the house, and he’s good with the children. But when it comes to things outside, it’s a different kettle of fish. When it comes to where he’s going and how he’s going to get there, then
no one
has a scrap of influence on him.’

She said it with submission. Gossips at Basset, and places like it, often said confidently that she ran him. Partly because she was splendid to look at, partly because, as in the incident of Sammikins, Roger behaved to her with deference and chivalry. She’s the master in that set-up, the gossips said in knowledgeable whispers, particularly in Caro’s smart, rich world.

Caro had just told me who the master was. She said it as though with surprise at her own submission. Also, as she spoke, there was a jab of triumph at my expense, for she was insisting that I was a subordinate also. She liked insisting on it – because Caro, who seemed as dashing and as much a gambler as her brother, whom other women grumbled had had all the luck, was jealous of her husband’s friends.

‘No one’s going to push him where he doesn’t want to go,’ she said, ‘it’s just as well to get that straight.’

‘I’ve done a certain amount of business with him, you know,’ I said.

‘I know about the business you’ve been doing. What do you take me for?’ she cried, ‘that’s why I’ve got to talk to you. What is it all going to add up to?’

‘I should guess,’ I said, ‘that he’s a better judge of that than I am.’

‘I’ve not said so to him’ – Caro’s eyes were fierce – ‘because one never ought to say these things or even think them, once he’s made up his mind, if one’s going to be any help – but I doubt if he’s going to get away with it.’

‘It’s a risk,’ I replied. ‘But he’s gone into it with his eyes open.’

‘
Has
he?’

‘What do you mean? Don’t you believe in what he’s doing?’ I asked.

‘I’ve got to believe in it.’

‘Well?’

‘I can’t argue with you. I don’t know enough,’ she said. ‘But I’d follow my instincts, and I don’t think he’s got an even chance of getting away with it. So I want to ask you something.’ She was speaking, not in a friendly tone, but with passion.

‘What is it?’

‘He’ll do what he wants in the long run. I’ve given you fair warning. But you and your friends can make it more difficult for him.
Don’t
. That’s what I’m asking you. I want you to give him room to manoeuvre. He may have to slide gracefully out of this whole business. That doesn’t matter, if he does it in time. But if he gets in it up to the neck, then he might ruin himself. I tell you, you and your friends mustn’t make it too difficult for him.’

She was no more intellectual than Sammikins. She rarely read anything, except fashionable memoirs. But she knew this game of high politics better than I did, perhaps better than Roger did himself. She knew it
as
a game, in which one won or lost. It did not count whether Roger had to abandon a policy. What did count, was whether his chances of a high office were going up or down. To that, she was utterly committed, utterly loyal, with every cell of her flesh.

Previously, I had been getting colder to her. But suddenly the passion of her loyalty moved me.

I said, the whole campaign was in his hands. He was too good a politician not to smell the dangers.

‘You’ve got to make it easy for him.’

‘I don’t think you need worry–’

‘How do you expect me not to? What’s going to happen to him if this goes wrong?’

‘I should have thought’ – I was now speaking gently – ‘that he was a very tough man. He’d come back, I’m sure he would.’

‘I’ve seen too many future PMs,’ she said, the edge having left her voice also, ‘who’ve made a mess of something, or somehow or other taken the wrong turn. They’re pretty pathetic afterwards. It must be awful to have a brilliant future behind you. I don’t know whether he could bear it.’

‘If he had to bear it,’ I said, ‘then of course he would.’

‘He’d never be satisfied with second prizes. He’d eat his heart out. Don’t you admit it? He’s made for the top, and nothing else will do.’

As she gazed at me with great open guiltless eyes, she was immersed in him. Then, all of a sudden, the intimacy and tension broke. She threw her head back in a hearty, hooting laugh, and exclaimed: ‘Just imagine him giving up the unequal struggle and settling down as Governor-General of New Zealand!’ She had cheered up, and had poured herself another drink.

I was amused by Caro’s picture of ultimate failure and degradation.

Soon I said that it was time I went home. She tried, insistently, naggingly, to keep me there for another quarter of an hour. Although we were on better terms by now, she was not fond of me. It was simply that, with husband away, children away, she was bored. Like Diana, and other rich and pretty women, she was not good at being bored, and the person nearest to her had to pay for it. When I refused to stay she sulked, but began thinking that she would enjoy gambling her time away. As I left the house, she was ringing round her friends, trying to arrange for a night’s poker.

I had said to Caro that Roger was too good a politician not to smell the dangers. In fact, a nose for danger was the most useful single gift in the political in-fighting: unless it stopped one acting altogether, in which case it was the least. That winter, while others were still vertiginous about Suez, Roger was looking out for opponents, critics, enemies, a year ahead. His policy would be coming into the open then. It was better tactics to let powers like Lufkin get the first taste of it from Roger direct. Patiently he set himself to dine out with them, telling them a little, occasionally letting out a burst of calculated candour.

Moving round Whitehall and the clubs, I got some of the backwash of all this. I even heard a compliment from Lord Lufkin, who said: ‘Well, considering that he’s a politician, you can’t say that he’s altogether a fool.’ This evaluation, which in both form and content reminded me of the New Criticism, was the highest praise I remembered Lufkin bestowing on anyone, with the solitary exception of himself.

Towards the end of December, Roger passed one of these forestalling operations on to me. The scientists had fallen behind with their report, but we knew it was going to be delivered early in the New Year; we knew also what it was going to contain. There would be differences in detail between Laurence Astill and Francis Getliffe, but by and large they would all be saying the same thing, except for Brodzinski. He had retained an implacable confidence throughout, absolutely assured both that he was right and that he must prevail. It was clear that he would insist on writing a minority report.

My job, said Roger, was to give him a hint of the future, to pacify him, but to warn him that for the present he couldn’t bank on much support, that Government couldn’t do much for him.

My own nose for danger twitched. I still reproached myself for not having been open with Douglas Osbaldiston from the start, when he had invited me to do so. I thought it was right to be open with Brodzinski now. But I felt sure that Roger ought to do it.

Roger was vexed and overtired. When I said that I shouldn’t have any success, Roger replied that I had been doing these things all my life. When I said that Brodzinski was a dangerous man, Roger shrugged. No one was dangerous, he replied, unless he represented something. He, Roger, was taking care of the industry and the military. Brodzinski was just a man out on his own. ‘Are you afraid of a bit of temperament? We’re going to run into worse than that, you know. Are you going to leave everything to me?’

It was as near a quarrel as we had had. After I left him, I wrote him a letter saying that he was making a mistake, and that I wouldn’t talk to Brodzinski. Feeling superstitious, I went over to the window and then returned to my desk and tore the letter up.

After the next meeting of the scientists, a few days before Christmas, I took my chance to get Brodzinski alone. Walter Luke had walked away with Francis Getliffe and Astill; Pearson was going off, as he did phlegmatically each fortnight, to catch the evening plane to Washington. So I could ask Brodzinski to come across with me to the Athenaeum, and we walked along the edge of the pond in the shivery winter dark. A steam of mist hung over the black water. Just after I heard the scurry, glug and pop of a bird diving, I said: ‘How do you think it is going?’

‘What is going?’ In his deep, chest-throbbing voice, Brodzinski as usual addressed me in style.

‘How do you think the committee is going?’

‘Let me ask you one question. Why did those three’ (he meant Luke, Getliffe, Astill) ‘go away together?’

He was almost whispering in the empty park. His face was turned to mimic, his great eyes luminous with suspicion. ‘They went away,’ he answered himself, ‘to continue drafting without me being there to intervene.’ It was more than likely. If it had not been likely, he would still have imagined it.

‘Do you think that I am happy about the committee–?’ Once more, the bass, unyielding courtesy.

We walked in silence. It was not a good start. In the club, I took him upstairs to the big drawing-room. There, on the reading desk, was the Candidates’ Book. I thought it might mollify him to pass by. His name was entered: we had all signed our names in support, Francis, Luke, Astill, Osbaldiston, Hector Rose, the whole lot of us. Somehow everyone knew that he craved to be a member, that he was passionately set on it. We were doing our best. Not merely to soften him, to keep him quiet: but in part, I thought, for an entirely different reason. Despite his force of character, despite his paranoia, there was something pathetic about him.

No, not despite his paranoia, but because of it. Paranoia had a hypnotic effect, even on tough and experienced men. I had come across a first intimation of this earlier in my life, in the temperament of my earliest benefactor, George Passant. It was not entirely, or even mainly, his generosity, his great balloon-like dreams, that drew the young: it was not the scale of his character or his formidable passions. It was that, in his fits of suspicion, of feeling done down and persecuted, he was naked to the world. He called for, and got, sympathy in the way most of us could never do. We might behave better: we might need help out of proportion more: we might even be genuinely pathetic. And yet, by the side of the George Passants, we could never suggest to those round us that revelation, that insight into pathos, which came from seeming innocent, uncorrupt, and without defence.

It was like that with Brodzinski. I had told Roger that Brodzinski was a dangerous man: that was a workaday comment, the sort of warning I could keep in the front of my mind. Sitting by him at the end of the Athenaeum drawing-room, watching his eyes stray to the Candidates’ Book, I wasn’t thinking about warnings: I could feel how once more he was exposed to the brilliance of suspicion, this naked sense of a group of privileged persons, whom he wanted above all to belong to, conspiring together to push him out. One’s impulse, even mine, was to make it easier. He ought to be shown that there were no plots against him; one ought to lend a hand. I found myself hoping that the Committee would elect him out of turn.

When I offered him a drink, he asked for half a glass of sherry and sipped at it, looking doubtfully at me while I put down a whisky. For a man so massive and virile, he was curiously old-maidish in some of his habits – or perhaps it was that he expected to find in all Anglo-Saxons the signs of incipient alcoholism. I said: ‘The Minister is extremely grateful for all you’ve done on his committee. You know how grateful he is, don’t you?’

‘He is a fine man,’ said Brodzinski, with deep feeling.

‘I am sure,’ I went on, ‘that before long the Government will want to give you some recognition.’

I knew that it was being arranged for him to get a CBE in the June Honours List. I had settled with Roger that I should hint at this.

Brodzinski stared at me with lambent eyes. He understood some of Whitehall politics much better than most Englishmen: but on these matters of honorific etiquette, he was mystified. He could not have guessed where Roger or Douglas Osbaldiston, or anyone else, came in. On the other hand, he gave a very English reply.

‘It doesn’t matter whether I get recognized. All that matters is that we do the right thing.’

‘The Minister is extremely grateful for the advice you have given. I know he’ll want to tell you so himself.’

Brodzinski sat back in the leather-covered chair, his great chest protruding like a singer’s. His face, wide and shield-shaped, was hard with thought, the flap of dusty hair fell to his eyebrows. He was still preoccupied, I guessed, with the thought of drafting going on without him. Yet he was happy. Roger he had spoken of as a trusted, powerful friend. He was sitting with me as though I were another friend, lesser, but still powerful.

‘It will soon be time,’ he said, ‘for the Minister to assert himself.’

I was having to feel my way.

‘Of course,’ I said, ‘what any Minister can do on his own is pretty limited.’

‘I am afraid I do not understand you.’

‘I mean,’ I said, ‘you mustn’t expect miracles. He’s a very able man, as I’m sure you realized a long time ago, and he’s prepared to do things that most Ministers wouldn’t. But, you know, he can’t do much without the support of his colleagues at all levels. He can only do what a great many people think ought to be done – not just himself.’

There was a rim of white all round his irises. His gaze was fixed on me, and stayed so. He said:‘I still do not understand you–’ Once more he addressed me in full. ‘Or, at least I
hope
I do not understand you.’

‘I am saying that the area of freedom of action for a Minister is smaller, a great deal smaller, than most people can ever understand.’